


Orbital Mechanics

by verdant_fire



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Astronomy, Dreams, Johnlock Roulette, London, Longing, M/M, POV Sherlock Holmes, Physics, Pining, Pining Sherlock, Post-Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-31
Updated: 2013-12-31
Packaged: 2018-01-06 21:15:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1111608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verdant_fire/pseuds/verdant_fire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock may have disavowed any knowledge of the solar system, but he orbits John Watson all the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Orbital Mechanics

When one star in a binary star system dies, the other will slowly drift out into space, unmoored and aimless.

//

It has been sixty-two days, eight cities, and twenty-two members of Moriarty’s network since Sherlock last saw London. Mycroft sends him money and surveillance photos of John, Mrs Hudson and Lestrade. Mrs Hudson looks smaller and thinner, and Lestrade is obviously exhausted, worn ragged around the edges.

Sherlock looks at the pictures of John last. In the first, John is wearing his horrendous oatmeal jumper and his most military bearing. But Sherlock can see the slight shift in his stance to favour his right leg: psychosomatic limp acting up again. He can see the tightness in John’s eyes and mouth, tell-tale signs of stress. John usually thrives under stress, but clearly this is a new kind, one Sherlock didn’t have the chance to observe.

In the most recent photo, John is sat in his chair, curled in on himself like burning paper. Looking at it too long evokes a dull, roiling heat behind Sherlock’s sternum, as if he had swallowed sulphuric acid.

If John were actually burning, sending up smoke like a signal fire, Sherlock is sure, somehow, that he would be able to see it from anywhere in the world.

//

Two weeks in Argentina and he still hasn’t got used to the heat. When he ventures outside, it’s under a broad-brimmed hat that hides his sharp eyes and sharper cheekbones from the villagers. He buys coffee and mangoes because he can’t remember when he ate last and that’s a bit not good.

John would’ve made him eat.

John’s not here.

//

The media, of course, has seized breathlessly upon his ‘suicide’. He reads the coverage from a library computer in Vienna. There are endless speculative, tell-all articles, most sensational, all of them wrong. Lestrade is still fighting to keep his job at the Yard. John is still being pursued by the paparazzi, looking small and tired and painfully diminished, in a way that Sherlock can’t quite define—not until hours later, when he looks in the mirror at his own expression, and thinks, _oh_. Oh.

He’d asked Mycroft to keep the papers away from John, but Mycroft refused, saying it was necessary to avoid suspicion. Sherlock can’t decide whether he hates his brother more for refusing, or for being right. For his own part, he’s finding it more and more difficult to do what is necessary, in light of the fact that the cost of such necessity is becoming higher and higher every day.

What seems truly necessary is that he should _stop this_ , stop John looking that way, stop causing him pain.

//

While he is mapping out the remnants of Moriarty’s network, he talks to John. It helps him think. Connections and hierarchies fall into place until he can see which node has to be neutralised next. He turns, to bask in John’s praise, and is brought up short by reality.

The sensation is much like stumbling over a missing stair.

//

Neurochemically, severed attachment is similar to the comedown after a high: decreased endorphin levels, dopamine deficiency, diminished activity in the nucleus accumbens. So it’s perfectly rational that he should feel this way, as though something is missing, because it is.

It’s perfectly rational.

//

In his dreams, London _breathes_. Its rain-slick, cobblestone hide glistens under the streetlights. Its exhalations crinkle the skin of the Thames and spin the Eye like a pinwheel. The Underground trains thunder through its veins, and the pulse of the City is a constant metronome.

In his dreams, the heart of the city beats on, embodied in the chambers and ventricles of 221B. At its centre sits a homunculus, built of steel and bravery and clad in wool jumpers, deceptively mundane and absolutely vital.

//

While he is away, he reads dozens of books on astronomy, because he needs something to occupy his mind and because he is still trying to define the serrated edge of longing that seizes him whenever he studies the subject. _What does that matter?_

When John stretched out his hand to him from the pavement, as though he could freeze him in place by sheer force of will, Sherlock felt an almost gravitic pull. He has not stopped feeling it since.

//

Alexandria is full of the acrid grief of lost knowledge, of the ghosts of thousands of books that keep company with the human remains underground, in the tortuous treasure trove of the Necropolis.

The ancient Egyptians used rock salt to preserve their dead and packed the bodies in it for its desiccative properties. Sherlock treats his memories of Baker Street like small sacred corpses, packs them into glass sarcophagi in his mind palace and visits occasionally, a tourist in the museum of his own life.

//

The North Sea smells of brine and distance, sprawling all the way from where he stands to the shores of England, where it is 4 AM and John is (probably) sleeping in a small neat heap on the right side of his bed. John never sleeps with his back to the door, and he sleeps either on his back or on his good shoulder. He does not snore. Sherlock knows this because he used to occasionally, when bored, walk into John’s room and watch him sleep. He had mapped out John’s sleep patterns over a week and had started adjusting for other variables, such as physical activity during the day (running six blocks in Islington, Tuesday) and auditory stimuli (violin, forty-five minutes, Wednesday), when John had finally caught him at it and told him _For God’s sake, Sherlock, the door was closed for a reason,_ whereupon Sherlock had pointed out that it hadn’t been locked, making sure to slam said door on his way out.

The next morning he’d shown John the approximate EEG he’d drawn up of his brain activity and explained that, while it was lamentably imprecise and needed to be done properly in a controlled environment, the alpha wave amplitude indicated that John would have fewer nightmares if he ran more often and gave up his late-night curries. John had blinked, said nothing, and made him tea. He’d left his bedroom door open that night and every night after.

Sherlock saved the EEG in his mind palace, in the annex that belongs to John. When he needs to sleep and can’t, he traces the peaks and troughs with his mind until they blur into a single wave that pulls him under.

In his dreams, he sets his heart upon the water, and waits.

//

Since the near-miss in Prague, he has avoided graveyards. He found himself dangerously distracted by the vivid memory of John at his grave, standing there stoic and hollowed-out, like London after the Blitz.

//

Everything in America is absurdly young. The buildings here, even in the dubiously named New England, are too new to have put down roots. There is no weight of age or history in the stones, and it all smacks of an insular cultural naïveté that Sherlock finds deeply distasteful. The country itself is appallingly oversized and seems to be mocking him with its sprawl, filled as it is with outgrowths of Moriarty’s network. Before his death, it had metastasized across four continents, and some days he despairs of ever eliminating all of it.

Sometimes it takes quite a long time to connect the next dot. He would have relished the challenge, before.

//

It’s raining in sparse, fat drops, falling slowly, struggling through the thick air. The smell of it, damp and oddly musty, is rare here, in the middle of the Mojave Desert. This town is a geographical anomaly, and he is too conspicuous here, sticking out like an orchid in a field of dandelions.

John would fit in here, with his weathered colouring and talent for survival. It would be second nature to him, camouflaged predator that he is.

Several of the scrub bushes are a precise match for the colour of John's hair.

//

One of his hotel rooms in Russia has a fireplace with two chairs in front of it. Since Mycroft arranged the reservation, Sherlock makes a mental note to be especially insufferable to him when next he phones. Sherlock flings his bag in the direction of the bedroom, in which he is not going to sleep. He does not stare too long at the empty chair to the left of the fireplace, and absolutely does not envision John sitting in it, looking up at him in fond amazement.

Sherlock turns his back on the fireplace and examines his map of Moriarty’s network. There are seventeen members left to track down and neutralise, and he estimates that this will take at least another six months. This seems like an unacceptably long time, but it cannot be helped.

He does not admit to himself that any further amount of time, no matter how small, is unacceptable.

//

The last time he was this agitated, he was still using. He could be again. The indicators of a flourishing local drug trade are hideously obvious. He could be stratospherically high within an hour if he likes. And then the noise would stop, the roaring flood of useless stimuli generated by stupid, useless people living their stupid, useless lives and never bothering to be quiet about it. His mind would still to a perfect, crystalline precision, like an elegant mathematical proof, like Bach at his most pristine.

Instead, he buys cigarettes in a fit of restless longing. He stands near the tiny slit window of his room and smokes the first one. The nicotine enters his bloodstream in a heady rush, and the attendant modulation of neurotransmitters is almost enough to drown out John’s voice in his head, going on and on about how smoking is awful for you and how Sherlock will probably end up in an early grave if he doesn’t stop.

Sherlock bins the pack after the second cigarette. They taste terrible.

//

He watches one of Moriarty’s assassins bleed out in a field near the Appian Way and thinks that he is building a road of corpses back home, back to John: skulls for cobblestones and blood for mortar.

//

He still has nightmares of the pool, sometimes, on the rare occasions he loses his constant battle with sleep. The iterations vary, but John always dies. The laser sight’s red dot haemorrhages into a cloud of blood and bone, or the water swallows John whole, or, or, or. His subconscious is torturously creative. When he wakes, shivering, he can still smell the chlorine.

It takes, on average, 3.2 minutes to get his heart rate back to its baseline value.

//

Scotland is intolerable. There are far too many hideous cabled jumpers on the backs of its inhabitants. He wants to set every last one of the offending garments on fire, as a warning to the other Scots and their abysmal aesthetic sense.

When this thought makes the corners of his mouth pull up and his throat constrict, he is taken almost entirely by surprise.

//

Kepler’s third law, the law of harmonies, compares the orbital periods and radii of different planets.

Whenever he arrives in a new city, Sherlock calculates the distance back to Baker Street. It is a mental tic he can’t seem to shake, horridly sentimental though it is.

When he sleeps at all, it is with his face turned toward London.

//

He feels, more than ever, as if the universe has disappointed him in some deep and unforgivable way, and not least because he can no longer resign himself to the disappointment. Before he met John, he had almost learnt to manage it, had put aside the cocaine and used the Work to mitigate his disgust at life. If he believed in such ridiculously unscientific concepts as karma, he would have called John his reward for good behaviour.

This second disappointment should be easier to weather, given the amount of practice he has already accumulated. But instead of coming in overwhelming waves like the first, it aches constantly, like his bones did when he was fourteen and adding height faster than his body could handle. _Growing pains,_ Mycroft had said, but that is where the analogy breaks down. He is not growing now; he feels instead as though his world is shrinking down to a single end goal, which is inextricably intertwined with the ache.

He wonders, occasionally, if he really did break something in the fall, and it has taken him all this time to notice.

//

Sherlock stands outside a busy shopping centre in Copenhagen and hunches his shoulders against the night’s insinuating chill. People are susurrating around the nearest entrance in a variegated, multi-coloured mass of humanity, not unlike the pointillist tableau of crowds in a Tube station. If he is bored enough to watch for patterns in their interactions, which he is, he can sort them by family groups, friends, couples. They swirl together and apart and together like shining droplets of mercury. Above them, the stars are prism-bright and lancing, just as they were in a London back alley, well over a year ago now.

John was the first in a very long time to believe that there was more to Sherlock than brilliance and sociopathy, to think that he was capable of empathy and kindness. Sherlock had always depended on John for those things, but he found that he did not want to disappoint John, that his approval was worth earning.

John had been a steady, fixed point in Sherlock’s life. In many ways, he still is.

Sherlock may have disavowed any knowledge of the solar system, but he orbits John Watson all the same.


End file.
